Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

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English commentators liken Broks to Oliver Sacks, which is high praise but off the mark. Sacks relates whole cases, such as "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," laying out the brain physiology and the panoply of behavioral distortions involved in neurological abnormality. Broks, a psychologist rather than a physician like Sacks, uses cases as jumping-off points for essays in search of personality, unique consciousness, the soul. He believes there is something in the brain that neuroscience may never find or explain, and that gives each of us the sense of self. Moreover, he posits that dualism is inescapable for consciousness, which demands that each of us discriminate between physical and mental "parts" of the self, despite the inseparability of those parts. While he has readers chewing those insoluble nuggets, he tells his patients' and his own riveting stories, at least one of which, "To be two or not to be," is science fiction of the very highest order. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

A finalist for The Guardian First Book Award, Into the Silent Land is a stunning look into how the human brain constructs a "self," or the essence of who we are as individuals. A neuropsychologist with twenty-five years' experience and a runner-up for the prestigious Wellcome Trust Science Prize, Paul Broks writes with a doctor's precision and clarity in a series of narratives about the fascinating world of the neurologically impaired, delving not only into the inner lives of his patients, but into a deeper understanding of how we define who we are. Fusing classic cases of neuropsychology with the author's own case studies, personal vignettes, philosophical debate, and thought-provoking riffs and meditations on the nature of neurological impairments and dysfunctions, Into the Silent Land is an illuminating study of neuroscience, and an extraordinary look into the unknown world of the self.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (April 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141285
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141286
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #437,605 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The philosophic and human implications of neuropathology, August 13, 2003

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (Hardcover)

A blurb on the cover touts neuropsychology Professor Broks, author of this intriguing book, as "The new Oliver Sacks." While any writer on neuropathology would be flattered to be compared to the renowned Dr. Sacks, whose books include the fascinating The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other clinical tales (1987), I don't think such a comparison is fair to either man.

While Broks and Sacks write about the sometimes bizarre consequences of neurological disorders, they do so from a different perspective. Sacks is more tightly focused on the patient and the pathology whereas Broks concentrates more on his personal experience as a neuropsychologist and the philosophic and emotional consequences of those experiences. Furthermore, while Sacks writes with an uncommon clarity and eloquence, Broks relies on a more literary style with excursions into memoir, story (sometimes reminding me distantly of Borges), Socratic dialogue, and dream sequence.

Each chapter in the book is a personal experience essay. Some chapters recall patients with disorders, some do not. Some chapters are intensely personal, as is the final chapter on the experience of his wife's breast cancer. Others are almost completely philosophical. What can pathology, especially neuropathology, teach us about what it means to be human and to be self-aware is what Broks is asking in all of the chapters, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. His answer is equivocal and meandering; in short he isn't sure. I respect that because I'm not sure either, and I don't know anyone who is.

Broks begins by experiencing the pulsating brain as raw meat. He is mesmerized by the "absolute conviction" that in the flesh "behind the face" being probed by the surgeon, "there's no one there." (p. 17) This leads him to reject the "Mysterian" position on consciousness and Cartesian dualism. He excises the ghost in the machine and comes to realize that the "I" of our experience is nowhere at all, but is an ever-changing, ever constructing presence among the modules of the brain.

"Thoughts, feelings, and intentions produce me, not the other way around," is how he expresses it on page 80. He sees the "I" that experiences and reflects upon experience as "not a single thing, or a thing at all," but as "a principle of biological organization." (p. 100)

This is a profound insight from modern neuroscience and philosophy as presented by people like Francis Crick and Daniel Dennett, whom Broks cites, and others. But Broks is neither completely satisfied with this unsettling point of view, nor is he complacent to leave it at that. In my favorite chapter of the book, "To Be Two or Not to Be," Broks presents a science fiction scenario in which one is teleported to Mars. One's body is exhaustively copied on Mars from information sent from Earth. Every single atom is replicated exactly as it appears in the original and then the original is destroyed, allowing one to travel at the speed of light.

In effect this is a thought experiment asking the question "Who are you?" Are you the original or the copy? The copy assures us that he is the same continuous being that was on Earth and is now on Mars. He is the father of his children, the husband of his wife, and is the man who was once the child. He has all this in his memory. He certainly did not die. And besides he has done this a dozen times and is still alive.

But Broks throws a monkey wrench into this scenario by having the original not destroyed. Now who is who? And if the original is now to be destroyed, how does he feel about that?

What is different from the man on Earth and his identical on Mars? Absolutely nothing (although because of their now different environments they are beginning to change). Yet the original prefers that he continue living, as does the copy.

This story really highlights the Buddhist idea that we do not exist as we think we do. There is no "self," no "ego-I"; we do not die because we were never living in the sense that we think we were. What exists is pure identification, so to speak, that everybody has identically. That does not die. It is always there in a sentient being.

Broks acknowledges this Buddhist perspective, admits that in some sense he is uneasy about it; admits that in some sense, at some times, he is a Mysterian, who does believe in something non-material in ourselves. (See "Right This Way, Smiles a Mermaid" beginning on page 132.)

Another point that Broks makes is that we do not exist in isolation. "The working brain has to be understood not only as part of a larger biological system (the rest of the body), but also as a component of the wider social system." (p. 102) I would add that we are also part of this planet and its systems, and in the most minute, but real sense, part of the cosmos.

Broks believes that the familiar soul-body dualism from Decartes is hard-wired into our brains by the process of evolution. (p. 138) He also believes that "phenomenal consciousness--the raw feel of experience--is invisible to conventional scientific scrutiny and will forever remain so." (p. 140)

I agree that the idea of a soul is adaptive in an evolutionary sense. It allows for us to have hope in many seemingly hopeless situations. It furthers the adaptiveness of the tribe which furthers the adaptiveness of the members of the tribe. I also agree that such phenomena as the taste of ice cream, the experience of the color red, etc., are not subject to scientific evaluation. Science is preeminently a social exercise in that, without peer review and confirming experiments by other scientists, would not exist as such. Consequently it is futile to expect something purely subjective to find scientific proof.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Puzzles Than Your Brain Can Handle, July 3, 2003

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (Hardcover)

Everything we know or think or feel is somehow processed within the contents of our craniums. Thoughts happen without our thinking about making them occur or about the incalculably complex neuronal interactions that would make them happen. How can it possibly happen that intracranial meat makes mentation? Check with an expert, like Paul Broks, who is a British lecturer and consultant in neuropsychology, the study of brain processes that produce thought and behavior. In _Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology_ (Atlantic Monthly Press), he will bring you up short: "My area of supposed expertise, neuropsychology, is the subject about which I feel the most profound ignorance." He cannot satisfactorily account for how the brain generates conscious awareness. He reflects that this is something like finding out that your airplane pilot knows nothing of lift, drag, and so on. And yet, the patients he describes in his book, and his own introspection, and his fictional thought experiments are so strange that readers will be amazed that they could have ever taken themselves (or their _selves_) for granted.

The people Broks sees in his clinic are those with damaged brains of some sort, "thought experiments made flesh." This is the territory previously explored for us by Oliver Sacks, whom Broks names as an influence on his own thinking and writing. Especially illustrative are the split brain patients, those who have had the cables cut from right brain to left, usually to try to short circuit seizures. It is possible to get a sedative to one side of such brains and then to the other, so that clinicians can interview only one half-brain at a time. In such a patient, Naomi, Broks finds, "Ms Left-brain was talkative and cheerful. Ms Right-brain was unsettled, mute, morose." But Ms Left-brain afterwards was responsible for describing the entire session, and had no memory of Ms Right-brain's difficulties. This is the usual sort of sharing, and not just in patients with split brains. The left hemisphere not only is the spokesman for both, but also is "the brain's spin doctor," making odd events (such as the transient communicative ability of the right brain) comprehensible and acceptable. The left brain, quite simply, lies to make a palatable reality. We are all split up like this. Different wrinkles in the brain handle language, thoughts, memories, feelings. Broks worries: "There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul." Unity is an illusion. The brain is pretty well mapped, via MRI slices, and we have good ideas about what large parts of it do, but even if you look around a living brain, you will fine no self there; "... there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact." But take heart; even if we exist in some mysterious emptiness between neurological components, this is itself a "... beautiful, liberating thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by comparison."

Though serious, Broks's book has a lot of fun with the paradoxes of consciousness. It is often a set of arguments for different sides of questions, with no firm answers. It is not just case studies, but includes reflections on the fate of Einstein's brain, and on the status of the "Little People" in Robert Louis Stevenson's dreams that gave the author his best work. Broks has written some whimsical stories to bring points home. Memorable is a sci-fi parable which summarizes many of the puzzling ideas Broks presents. It involves a teleporter, something like the famous one in Star Trek. For a trip to Mars, the machine scans every atom of the traveler, reduces the information to digital format, sends the data to Mars, where every atom is reconstructed. The rules of teleportation, however, decree that the sender has to be annihilated; this avoids duplication. But what happens when the machine malfunctions, sending the data for proper reconstruction, but doesn't do the vaporization of the original sender? Where is the person? How can one mind be in two places? How long before they become two different persons by having different experiences? Which one should the authorities, belatedly, vaporize? The witty story is titled "To Be Two or Not to Be". It climaxes an enigmatic and enlightening book that will give much contemplation to anyone with a brain.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Reading For Anyone, Especially For Psychology Buffs, October 31, 2003

By	Taos Turner "Books Rock" (Greeley, Colorado United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (Hardcover)

This is an extraordinarily interesting book. I say this as an average reader and not as someone with training in neuropsychology or neurosurgery.

This will be of interest to anyone who is curious about life in general, but it will be greatly appealing to psychology and philosophy buffs. The book will be of special interest to anyone interested in the so-called mind-body problem.

What is the nature of our identity as individuals? Do we have a soul? What is the difference between a soul and a mind? Are we nothing more than the grey matter encaged inside our skulls? The author, Paul Broks, does not provide new or even concrete answers to these questions. But he explores them in hugely entertaining ways. This is not a dreary, poorly written book on psychology, philosophy or personally identity theory. It is an exceptionally entertaining look at the brain and how its defects can affect our personality and sense of identity.

Broks is a British neuropsychologist. He makes the book enjoyable by telling incredibly interesting tales about his patients and their problems. I would recommend this book to just about anyone, not only those people who have a background in this field. It is a pleasure to read. Moreover, at only 242 pages, most readers will be able to finish the whole book in just a couple of days. But they may be sorry when it is finished.